Of the 143 U.S medical schools with full or provisional accreditation by the LCME, 45 schools had a unique name associated with their MD programs representing a prevalence rate of 31.4%. (Although only counted once, Harvard had two names—see Table 1). Of the 17 LCME accredited, Canadian medical schools, only 1 of 17 (5.8%) had a unique name associated with their MD programs.
While a variety of themes are represented by the listed array of curricular names, names relating to exploration and to the domains of science and technology were the most prevalent, followed closely by names associated with institutional recognition and by what we are calling complex and/or undifferentiated themes. No clear theme predominated among the 46 North American schools, however an increasing number of schools (N=8) appear to be employing the use of creative acronyms (ACE, M-Delta, CIRCLE, LEARN, Next Step, etc) to describe their curricular approaches and evoke correlating imagery.
Notably, when the 45 U.S. schools with distinctive curricular names were analyzed in accordance with geographic region—using the four regions (Northeast, South, West, Midwest) defined by the U.S Census bureau, a relative paucity (N=5) of the 21 medical schools located in the Western United States (23.8%) had assigned specific names to their medical school curricula. This was in contrast to the number of Northeastern schools of which 13 of 34, or 38.2% had adopted a unique curricular name. Similarly, 12 of the 34 Midwestern schools (35.3%) had ascribed curricular names to their academic programs, as did 15 of the 54 Southern schools (27.8%). Efforts to identify trends in curricular themes used in different geographic regions were inconclusive, particularly given the relatively small number of curricular names that were aligned in any one category.
Using the 2017-2018 index of U.S. Medical School published in a recent edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association ( Barzansky and Etzel, 2018) as a guide, when considering medical schools in the 50 U.S. states, a relative predominance of private medical schools (19 of 51, or 37.3%) had assigned a specific name to their curricula, as opposed to the number of public medical schools (26 of 92 or 28.2%) that had done the same.
An additional review, based on the duration of LCME accreditation (LCME, 2018), revealed that while 30 of the U.S. medical schools accredited on or prior to 1942 had assigned distinctive names to their curricula, only 11 of the U.S. schools accredited in the 30-year increment between 1943-1973 had done the same. Surprisingly only 2 schools accredited in the period between 1974-2004, and 2 schools accredited on or after 2005, had assigned specific curricular names to their curricula.